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Sundance Osland Bilson-Thompson is an Australian theoretical particle physicist. He has developed the idea that certain preon models may be represented topologically, rather than by treating preons as pointlike particles. His ideas have attracted interest in the field of loop quantum gravity, [1] as they may represent a way of incorporating the Standard Model into loop quantum gravity. [2] This would make loop quantum gravity a candidate theory of everything.[ citation needed ]
In 2004 and 2005 Bilson-Thompson was a Visiting Academic at the University of Adelaide. From 2006 to 2009 he was a full-time academic at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. From 2010 he held a Ramsay Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Adelaide, Australia.
There have been recent claims that loop quantum gravity may be able to reproduce features resembling the Standard Model. So far only the first generation of leptons and quarks with correct parity properties have been modelled by Sundance Bilson-Thompson using preons constituted of braids of spacetime as the building blocks. [3] However, there is no derivation of the Lagrangian that would describe the interactions of such particles, nor is it possible to show that such particles are fermions, nor that the gauge groups or interactions of the Standard Model are realised. Utilization of quantum computing concepts made it possible to demonstrate that the particles are able to survive quantum fluctuations. [1]
In a 2005 paper, Sundance Bilson-Thompson proposed a model which adapted the Harari Rishon Model to preon-like objects which were extended ribbons, rather than point-like particles. [4] This provided a possible explanation for why ordering of the subcomponents matters (giving rise to colour charge) whereas in the older Rishon Model, this feature must be treated as an ad hoc assumption. Bilson-Thompson refers to his extended ribbons as "helons", and his model as the Helon Model.
This model leads to an interpretation of electric and colour charge as a topological quantities: electric charge as the number of twists carried on the individual ribbons, and colour charge as the number of variants of such twisting for a fixed electric charge.
In a subsequent paper from 2006 Bilson-Thompson, Fotini Markopolou, and Lee Smolin suggested that in any of a class of quantum gravity theories similar to loop quantum gravity in which spacetime comes in discrete chunks, excitations of spacetime itself may play the role of preons, and give rise to the standard model of particle physics as an emergent property of the quantum gravity theory. [2]
Consequently, Bilson-Thompson et al. proposed that loop quantum gravity could reproduce the standard model. In this scenario the four forces would already be unified. The first generation of fermions with correct charge and parity properties have been modelled using preons constituted of braids of spacetime as the building blocks. [2]
Bilson-Thompson's original paper suggested that the higher-generation fermions could be represented by more complicated braidings, although explicit constructions of these structures were not given. The electric charge, colour, and parity properties of such fermions would arise in the same way as for the first generation. The model was expressly generalized for an infinite number of generations and for the weak force bosons, but not for photons or gluons, in a 2008 paper by Bilson-Thompson, Hackett, Kauffman and Smolin. [5]
At the 2016 Australian federal election, Bilson-Thompson was the lead candidate for the Australian Cyclists Party on the senate ballot paper for South Australia. [6]
In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries the gravitational force. Thus, string theory is a theory of quantum gravity.
A theory of everything (TOE), final theory, ultimate theory, unified field theory, or master theory is a hypothetical, singular, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all aspects of the universe. Finding a theory of everything is one of the major unsolved problems in physics.
Loop quantum gravity (LQG) is a theory of quantum gravity that incorporates matter of the Standard Model into the framework established for the intrinsic quantum gravity case. It is an attempt to develop a quantum theory of gravity based directly on Albert Einstein's geometric formulation rather than the treatment of gravity as a mysterious mechanism (force). As a theory, LQG postulates that the structure of space and time is composed of finite loops woven into an extremely fine fabric or network. These networks of loops are called spin networks. The evolution of a spin network, or spin foam, has a scale on the order of a Planck length, approximately 10−35 meters, and smaller scales are meaningless. Consequently, not just matter, but space itself, prefers an atomic structure.
Lee Smolin is an American theoretical physicist, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo, and a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto. Smolin's 2006 book The Trouble with Physics criticized string theory as a viable scientific theory. He has made contributions to quantum gravity theory, in particular the approach known as loop quantum gravity. He advocates that the two primary approaches to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity and string theory, can be reconciled as different aspects of the same underlying theory. He also advocates an alternative view on space and time that he calls temporal naturalism. His research interests also include cosmology, elementary particle theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, and theoretical biology.
Fotini G. Markopoulou-Kalamara is a Greek theoretical physicist interested in quantum gravity, foundational mathematics, quantum mechanics and a design engineer working on embodied cognition technologies. Markopoulou is co-founder and CEO of Empathic Technologies. She was a founding faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and was an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo.
In quantum physics an anomaly or quantum anomaly is the failure of a symmetry of a theory's classical action to be a symmetry of any regularization of the full quantum theory. In classical physics, a classical anomaly is the failure of a symmetry to be restored in the limit in which the symmetry-breaking parameter goes to zero. Perhaps the first known anomaly was the dissipative anomaly in turbulence: time-reversibility remains broken at the limit of vanishing viscosity.
In physics, an anyon is a type of quasiparticle so far observed only in two-dimensional systems. In three-dimensional systems, only two kinds of elementary particles are seen: fermions and bosons. Anyons have statistical properties intermediate between fermions and bosons. In general, the operation of exchanging two identical particles, although it may cause a global phase shift, cannot affect observables. Anyons are generally classified as abelian or non-abelian. Abelian anyons, detected by two experiments in 2020, play a major role in the fractional quantum Hall effect.
The history of loop quantum gravity spans more than three decades of intense research.
Induced gravity is an idea in quantum gravity that spacetime curvature and its dynamics emerge as a mean field approximation of underlying microscopic degrees of freedom, similar to the fluid mechanics approximation of Bose–Einstein condensates. The concept was originally proposed by Andrei Sakharov in 1967.
In particle physics, preons are hypothetical point particles, conceived of as sub-components of quarks and leptons. The word was coined by Jogesh Pati and Abdus Salam, in 1974. Interest in preon models peaked in the 1980s but has slowed, as the Standard Model of particle physics continues to describe physics mostly successfully, and no direct experimental evidence for lepton and quark compositeness has been found. Preons come in four varieties: plus, anti-plus, zero, and anti-zero. W bosons have six preons, and quarks and leptons have only three.
Alternative models to the Standard Higgs Model are models which are considered by many particle physicists to solve some of the Higgs boson's existing problems. Two of the most currently researched models are quantum triviality, and Higgs hierarchy problem.
Causal dynamical triangulation (CDT), theorized by Renate Loll, Jan Ambjørn and Jerzy Jurkiewicz, is an approach to quantum gravity that, like loop quantum gravity, is background independent.
A topological quantum computer is a theoretical quantum computer proposed by Russian-American physicist Alexei Kitaev in 1997. It employs quasiparticles in two-dimensional systems, called anyons, whose world lines pass around one another to form braids in a three-dimensional spacetime. These braids form the logic gates that make up the computer. The advantage of a quantum computer based on quantum braids over using trapped quantum particles is that the former is much more stable. Small, cumulative perturbations can cause quantum states to decohere and introduce errors in the computation, but such small perturbations do not change the braids' topological properties. This is like the effort required to cut a string and reattach the ends to form a different braid, as opposed to a ball bumping into a wall.
In condensed matter physics, a string-net is an extended object whose collective behavior has been proposed as a physical mechanism for topological order by Michael A. Levin and Xiao-Gang Wen. A particular string-net model may involve only closed loops; or networks of oriented, labeled strings obeying branching rules given by some gauge group; or still more general networks.
"An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" is a physics preprint proposing a basis for a unified field theory, often referred to as "E8 Theory", which attempts to describe all known fundamental interactions in physics and to stand as a possible theory of everything. The paper was posted to the physics arXiv by Antony Garrett Lisi on November 6, 2007, and was not submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The title is a pun on the algebra used, the Lie algebra of the largest "simple", "exceptional" Lie group, E8. The paper's goal is to describe how the combined structure and dynamics of all gravitational and Standard Model particle fields are part of the E8 Lie algebra.
The Kodama state in physics for loop quantum gravity, is a zero energy solution to the Schrödinger equation.
In theoretical physics, a mass generation mechanism is a theory that describes the origin of mass from the most fundamental laws of physics. Physicists have proposed a number of models that advocate different views of the origin of mass. The problem is complicated because the primary role of mass is to mediate gravitational interaction between bodies, and no theory of gravitational interaction reconciles with the currently popular Standard Model of particle physics.
Simone Severini is an Italian-born British computer scientist. He is currently Professor of Physics of Information at University College London, and Director of Quantum Computing at Amazon Web Services in Seattle.
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